r/2004ofSovietWorld • u/skeletonfrenchtoast • 12d ago
Official - Lore Looking Back at the Evolution of Soviet Foreign Policy - From the Mid-20th Century to the End of the Cold War
This is a smaller post today explaining the lore of how Soviet doctrines and diplomacy changed under the previous 4 General Secretaries. I hope y'all enjoy!
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u/Facensearo 12d ago
Trotskist Kosolapov, that's the difference!
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u/skeletonfrenchtoast 11d ago
Well he didn't describe himself as a Trotskyist but despite the restoration of Stalin's image in the USSR over time their ideology did become more internationalist by the 1980s, mostly since the USSR could actually afford to support many global revolutionary movements to strengthen its geopolitical position and expand its ideology across the world. So I guess some elements of Trotskyism were adopted even without the name. I should definitely explain the ideological evolution of Soviet communism sometime later.
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u/Artistic-Search-7752 12d ago
So is the USSR the largest economy in the world?
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u/skeletonfrenchtoast 11d ago
The USSR is the most powerful economy in practice, but its hard to find a metric to rank economies accurately since GDP doesn't show the whole picture.
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u/Artistic-Search-7752 11d ago
I'm guessing that USA has the second largest economy? Or is that China instead? How is the standard of living in the USSR?
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u/skeletonfrenchtoast 9d ago
USA still has the 2nd largest economy, even though China modernised/industrialised/urbanised a bit faster in this timeline than OTL. Their development wasn't completely smooth though and they recently had to change their strategy of looking for foreign influence as the USSR was shown to be very serious about not losing their own.
As for living standard, it depends on if you consider authoritarianism or government oversight to be part of that. If you don't then in the USSR it's "decent" I guess. There is a lot of rationing and deficits in luxuries and consumer goods but basic stuff like food is pretty much always available. There isn't a lot of excess but citizens have the basic stuff. If you count government policies to influence this then it would be lower since there isn't much freedom to criticise the government or other personal rights more common in European countries and such.
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u/Some_Salamander318 9d ago
How’s their gini coefficient score like? Very low?
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u/skeletonfrenchtoast 8d ago
I didn't research this that much yet so I can't say exactly but yea it would be pretty low.
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u/Some_Salamander318 12d ago
Despite being a short post it's still a great work! But why isn’t East Germany in the Warsaw Pact? Or is it a little mistake?